Katica Roy* says women are leaving the workforce in significant numbers, at a huge cost to society of lost opportunity for growth and innovation.
Photo: Toa55
In no country on Earth are women equal to men.
Not one.
Not by any measure — by the World Economic Forum, United Nations, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) or many others.
In fact, in the West, it will take more than 150 years until we reach gender equality if our pace and urgency don’t change.
If gender equality is the vision, gender equity is the path.
According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO): “Gender equality, equality between men and women … does not mean that women and men have to become the same, but that their rights, responsibilities and opportunities will not depend on whether they are born male or female.”
“Gender equity means fairness of treatment for women and men, according to their respective needs.”
“This may include equal treatment or treatment that is different, but which is considered equivalent in terms of rights, benefits, obligations, and opportunities.”
The gender equality conversation plays out across every aspect of life; however, the aspects tend to converge in one arena: the workplace.
Women are leaving the workforce in significant numbers, and according to some projections, we will continue to see a decline in the labour force participation of women.
Why are they leaving?
Mummy tracking and universal assumption
At best, the “mummy tracking” concept — that women are less committed to their careers once they have children — is an ill-informed oversight.
For starters, 60 per cent of working women stay in the workforce long after the birth of their first child.
Additionally, falsely attributing the departure of women to motherhood overlooks the fact that 90 per cent of women leave their jobs for reasons other than having a child.
There is a difference between why they leave and when they leave.
We’re not listening.
Meaningful employer investment
In the United States, the labour force participation of women fell from 59.2 per cent in 2004 to 57 per cent in 2014 and it is projected to fall to 55.8 per cent in 2024.
Meanwhile, the US faces a rapidly growing skills gap.
A recent Georgetown University study projected a 5 million skilled workers shortage by 2020.
So, more women are leaving the workforce at a time when we actually need more of them to stay — and to succeed.
Yet the investment in them and approach to valuing them lack alignment with their capabilities.
Let’s look at the research:
- Men are promoted at a rate of 30 per cent greater than women at their first promotion.
- If there is only one woman in the candidate pool, she has statistically no chance of getting the job.
- We continue to see a pay gap of between 2o per cent and 60 per cent.
- Statistically, women are better sales professionals than men, yet are paid less and are a lower percentage of senior sales staff.
- Women take on almost twice as much unpaid work as men, and that correlates to decreased opportunity to assume leadership positions and lower labour force participation.
- And, if women advocate for gender diversity, they are penalised.
Clearly, we have off-spouts and cracks in the pipeline where missed opportunities for potential investment in female employees leads instead to their exiting the workforce, to decreased labour force participation of women and lower leveraging of talented women.
In other words, we have a very leaky pipeline.
These issues are causing the workforce pipeline to leak not only the talent to get the job done, but also lost opportunity for growth and innovation.
Beyond the immediate social injustice, it is also causing a gap in gross domestic product (GDP) — businesses are losing money and constricting their economic footprint, because they are not embracing the full capacity and capability of the female labour force.
The by-products of gender inequity
Let’s not forget that when we underinvest in our female workforce, we pay the price both now and in the future:
- Among people 65 and older, more than twice as many women (nearly 2.9 million) as men (over 1.3 million) lived in poverty in 2013.
- The US would close the social security savings gap by a third if it closed the gender pay gap.
- 56.5 per cent of children living in poverty are living in households headed by women.
So, not only are we leaving women behind, we are leaving the next generation behind.
The leaky pipeline has immediate and long-term costs that exponentially metastasise the longer we wait.
We must correct and change the narrative: women are not broken; the system is broken.
And we must focus on the real issue of fixing the system.
Why are we waiting?
Let’s fix the leaky pipeline.
* Katica Roy is a US-based ambassador for gender equity in the workplace and beyond and CEO and co-founder of artificial intelligence company Pipeline. She tweets at @katicaroy.
This article first appeared at www.ellevatenetwork.com.
